Leo Bersani, the Critical Inquiry Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago for 2012, will be conducting a graduate seminar called The Subject of Love. The course will run for four weeks from 16 April to 11 May. Here is his course description. For more information, please email Jay Williams, Senior Managing Editor, at jww4@uchicago.edu

The Subject of Love

Concepts and representations of love in certain philosophical, literary, and psychoanalytic texts, as well as in film, from Plato to Godard. If love is constituted by the language used to “describe” it, we might also argue that the construction of love as a psychic reality is inseparable from the elaboration of particular forms of subjectivity. To represent and to theorize different modes and objects of human love is, at least implicitly, to propose varying structures of selfhood. A history of amorous discourse reenacts and reformulates the Foucauldian project of tracing “the hermeneutics of subjectivity” in Western culture. We will be testing this hypothesis first in a few texts by ancient writers (Plato, Sophocles) and then, primarily, in modern works by Freud, D. H. Lawrence, Proust, Duras, Claire Denis, and Godard.

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2 responses to “The Subject of Love”

prefer to think about love in spiritual (but not “day-dreaming” idealistic – I could argue even with EO Wilson sociobiology approach) categories like f.e. Soren Kierkegaard’s – stage of life – human development (more in my book “Prolegomena to dialectics of love relationships – sadly,only in polish language for now – here is the sample: http://szod.pl/dialektyka_zwiazkow.htm